John Badham

I loved John Badham’s I’LL BE IN MY TRAILER: THE CREATIVE WARS BETWEEN DIRECTORS AND ACTORS. It’s been one of the most useful books I’ve read about directing actors for the screen. Badham, of course, is the veteran director of SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER, BIRD ON A WIRE, WAR GAMES and yards of other films and TV. I had the pleasure of working with him on a project about Paul Watson, the rogue environmentalist/pirate. If anyone’s qualified to do a nuts and bolts book about directing, John show more Badham is your guy.

In ON DIRECTING, Badham expands his survey beyond dealing with actors to the rest of directing, from why you don’t want to shoot a master shot of an action sequence (your editor will chop it up anyway), to how to use storyboards, to the need for a point of view in your camera placement.

No one can teach you everything about directing in a book. Actors need different things from their director. Directors have different cinematic styles. ON DIRECTING acknowledges that, but still gives you lots of useful tools and nuggets of information. How to deal with an actor who is creatively blocked. Why you need to slow fast action down, and how to do it convincingly. How to deal with actors who want to do their own stunts.

And it’s not all Badham’s knowledge. Badham has interviewed director and actor friends, and the book is filled with insightful quotations.

My only complaint, really, about this book, is that I wish it were a lot thicker. It’s 240 pages long, convenient for throwing into a backpack. I wish it were two or three times as long, because there’s so much to learn from it. show less

Director John Badham (Saturday Night Fever, WarGames) tells stories of Hollywood as a means of helping directors understand how most effectively to work with actors. More a textbook than a narrative, it's a worthy book with much good advice, but probably of limited use to those who aren't professionals in theatre or film.

Substance: A provocative thesis, and somewhat prescient given the advances in cyber-warfare and computer security "arms races" today (2011). The solution to the runaway computer was trite and unrealistically realized even then.
Style: Well-done in all respects other than noted above, but with the usual elision of any realistic situations that would slow down the story. People change their opinions without motivation; make judgments counter to any rational scenario; and scenes jump from peril show more to resolution without going through any intermediate steps. show less

I wanted to like these. I made myself read through the third one because I thought it was a trilogy. It didn’t end with 3. What a waste of time....